The Build America Bureau Has Not Established Adequate Controls To Oversee Its TIFIA Program

What We Looked At Established in 1998 through the Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century, the Transportation Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act (TIFIA) program provides long-term, low-interest loans and other types of credit assistance to eligible applicants for surface transportation projects. Accordingly, our audit objective was to assess the effectiveness of the Build America Bureau internal controls to oversee and manage TIFIA credit agreements.   What We Found The Build America Bureau has not established adequate internal controls to effectively oversee and manage its TIFIA credit assistance program. We found five instances where the Bureau did not notify borrowers timely, and one instance where the Bureau could not provide the notification letter. Additionally, we identified costs that had not been invoiced timely, as well as overpaid and unpaid fees. The Bureau has not provided operating administrations guidance that defines key roles and responsibilities for reviewing and approving TIFIA loan requisition requests. Further, the Bureau provided documentation to support 44 of the 47 disbursements we tested but could not provide documentation for 3 disbursements, totaling approximately $294.1 million. The Bureau maintains TIFIA loan applications and disbursement requests on a shared drive, which serves as its official system of record. We identified eight individuals who retained improper access to TIFIA’s shared drive and five discrepancies between TIFIA’s loan portfolio and the Bureau’s website.   Our Recommendations We are making 10 recommendations to improve internal controls for overseeing and managing credit agreements associated with the TIFIA program. The Bureau concurred with all our recommendations and provided completion dates. We consider recommendation 7 resolved and closed based on documentation the Bureau provided after our review was completed. We consider the remaining recommendations 1 through 6 and 8 through 10 resolved but open pending completion of the planned actions.